Google Wave: why we didn’t use it

Why didn't people flock to Google Wave? Ars staffers recount their own …

With Google pulling the plug on the development of Wave, its meant-to-be-revolutionary communications protocol, Ars staffers pondered Wave's collapse. The ideas in Wave were undeniably cool, the vision was ambitious, and Google backed it. So why did no one use it?

We looked to our own experiences of using Wave for clues as to what went wrong, and we found plenty.

Jon Stokes, Deputy Editor

When Google Wave was first announced, I was instantly struck by a use for it: role-playing games. After procuring an invite, I dove right in and was immediately hit by how slow and wonky the interface was. I expected both issues to be addressed in due time, so I set about looking for suitable RPGs to join.

I wrote an article on the results of my Wave RPG quest, then I quit using Wave while I waited for Google to improve it. Months later, I checked back in. Sure enough, Wave's performance had been improved. Its interface, sadly, had not.

Wave's primary interface sin was that it crammed a multiple-window-based desktop metaphor into a single browser window. In other words, Wave was a return to the bad old days of Windows 3.11-style MDI, and that made it ugly and initially confusing for even the savviest of users.

Still, Wave held promise, and I kept coming back. I had fantasies of using it like an IRC channel to keep in touch with old friends. I'd periodically try to rope different people into "waving" with me, and if I was able to get a response, I'd try unsuccessfully to keep the conversation going.

My last and most successful attempt at this was a Wave that I started called "The BH6 Club," the idea being that old-school hardware site editors would hang out and talk hardware. A lively hardware chat got underway among myself, Tech Report's Scott Wasson, and Real World Tech's David Kanter, but as the chat stretched on it became clear just how terribly unsuited Wave's interface was for extended, IM-style back-and-forth.

First, it was really not obvious how to spot the newest messages, because they could be nested somewhere deep in the middle (or, the "trough") of a long wave. To get to the bottom of a wave, where the new messages typically were, you had to do a lot of very painful scrolling. In the end, scrolling around in Wave's sluggish MDI interface was just not fun.

The other problem—and this was a huge issue and a common complaint—was that everyone could watch you type. The live typing was a core part of the Wave protocol, and the developers considered it a critical Wave feature that everyone should just either get over or learn to love. So there was never going to be any way to turn it off and enable a kind of "draft preview" that would let you send complete, IM-style messages. This was a major buzzkill; few people are comfortable in an informal chat where others can watch them type.

I also tried to use Wave for collaborative text editing on a church-related project, because I had read that it was becoming an increasingly popular tool for real-time, collaborative document creation. But again, Wave frustrated the other users' expectations about how the program should work, and the result was a bit of a mess. A combination of Etherpad (which Google had bought and used as the basis for Wave's real-time editing engine) and e-mail was a far superior way to carry out this same task.

In the final accounting, I'm still on board with the general idea of Wave, if not the actual implementation. E-mail does indeed need to be reinvented, but not quite so radically. Wave was just way too complex and ambitious a departure from normal e-mail, IM, and chat, and its terrible interface only served to exacerbate the complexity, instead of hiding it.

Chris Foresman, Contributing Writer

Wave had a very ambitious goal: it wanted to change how we communicate online and in real-time. It tried to combine the "paper trail" of e-mail, the immediacy of IM and IRC, and the collaborative text editing of a wiki. While the idea was a good one—having to use multiple protocols and applications to communicate with different people in different ways can be frustrating at times—Wave just didn't offer a better experience than the tools we already use.

Part of the reason for this is that there were no killer apps that leveraged Wave technology (not even Google's own Wave Web app, as Jon Stokes discussed previously). Google developed the Google Wave Federation Protocol to form the basis of Wave—it's the underlying protocol similar in some respects to SMTP for e-mail or HTTP for hypertext. The protocol is an open standard, and Google offered open source tools for developers to create Wave servers and support the Wave protocol in their own apps.

When Twitter first launched, it used a Web interface or SMS. But by using a straightforward and simple API, apps such as Twitterrific, Spaz, and Tweetdeck quickly sprang up on the desktop. Apps later launched on the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and other mobile platforms. The combination of a simple protocol and proliferation of clients helped propel Twitter's popularity.

Though there are a few examples of software from SAP, Novell, and Salesforce.com that have added Wave support, no widespread consumer apps have emerged. That dearth of compatible clients left users with no choice but to use Google's own (and in many cases, less than ideal) Web-based app.

With only one confusing interface to choose from, Wave just couldn't garner the mass appeal it needed to supplant more firmly entrenched forms of communication.

Ryan Paul, Open Source Editor

The developers who created Wave felt that they needed a clean break from the past in order to move messaging into the future. One consequence of that design philosophy is that Wave has no built-in support for the existing communication services that are ubiquitous today. Wave users can really only use Wave to communicate with other Wave users—it can't serve as a bridge to conventional e-mail and instant messaging.

Although Wave's sophisticated bot system would eventually have made it possible for third-party developers to produce the needed interoperability with "legacy" messaging technologies, the lack of such capabilities out of the box seriously undermined Wave's potential to attract users. Coupled with the invite system—which put an artificial limit on the total number of people who were even capable of participating in the Wave ecosystem—early users had practically nobody to talk to.

Another downside is that the service's lack of support for existing messaging protocols precluded the possibility of pulling it out of the browser and using it with existing messaging tools and workflows. If the developers had found practical ways to make it interoperate with Gmail and Google Talk, it would have been much more useful right away.

Ben Kuchera, Gaming Editor

Google Docs was something I was comfortable with and already using extensively. I remember being very excited about Google Wave; then I tried using it, and I had no idea what I was doing. It wasn't very intuitive, and I didn't feel like it had anything to offer over the collaborative online tools I was already using, like Google Docs. There didn't seem to be any strong vision for the project, and although I tried to use it to organize other people for a few projects, I finally gave up.

If you work online extensively, you probably have your own favored suite of programs, apps, and extensions that do exactly what you want them to do, and you're used to working with them. Google Wave seemed like it could do many of these things decently, but nothing incredibly well. That's the kiss of death.

For any application, you have to tell me in plain terms what I'm going to use it for, what problems it's going to solve, and how it's better than its competitors. If you can't do that—and I don't think Google ever did—it's more than likely going to end up in the bin.

Emil Protalinski, Contributing Writer

Google Wave tried to do too much from the get-go, and not a single thing truly appealed to users' needs. As such, the users who tried it out didn't see a use for it, and few bothered to come back. Google Wave was an experiment to see how powerful a Web app can be. That was its only success.

Jacqui Cheng, Senior Apple Editor

The reasons I didn't use Wave were simple: I was happy with what I used for similar purposes (Google Docs), Wave was overly complex, and no one else I knew used it for any reason—work, pleasure, or otherwise. What's the point if it's going to be just me?

John Timmer, Science Editor

I got on Google Wave pretty early during its invite-only phase through a bit of luck. I had covered some academic research a while back, and Google eventually bought the startup that commercialized the research. So I got in touch again; the researcher was not only kind enough to give me some good quotes for a news story, but he threw in a Wave invite as well. Thus I found myself in what is, for me, a rare position: on the bleeding edge of tech.

Living on that edge was a letdown. With Safari already strained by dozens of tabs containing story research and things I needed to read, I launched Wave and watched it bring my browser to a screaming, fan-twirling, beachball-spinning halt. Not only did the browser go completely unresponsive, but it did so in an unhelpful, AJAXy manner, with no hint of progress to indicate when I might be able to get some work done again. Not good.

At the time, Safari nightlies had one of the latest and greatest Javascipt interpreters, so I grabbed one of those. Performance was better, but still pretty bad.

In the end, I really didn't have the typical "what is this for?" reaction, because I decided it wasn't worth the time even to try to find out. I need tools that get things done with a minimum of fuss, and without battery-sucking overhead. I kill Flash before hitting the road for precisely this reason. Why would I want to invest time learning to use a service that people found mystifying when I wouldn't be able to run it while on the move?

A few months after giving up on it, one of our writers suggested trying Wave as a way of managing which writers are covering which science stories. Reports had suggested that Wave had seen significant improvements in the intervening time, so I forwarded the suggestion on to the whole group. Nobody was interested. Wave's reputation had apparently been set.

Clint Ecker, Project Manager/Programmer

Why Wave failed? The very genesis of this article holds a clue: conceived over IRC, sent out via mass e-mail, and collaboratively composed, edited, and compiled in a locally hosted Etherpad. This speaks volumes about how traditional tools are working a lot better for people than Google ever imagined, despite their problems.

77 Reader Comments

I'm constantly amazed at how most people, apparently including those at Google, don't get what they were making. I saw Wave as the potential glue to hold together the current disparate Internet. It was a set of intermingling protocols far more than what everyone saw, which was a single web tool that didn't work so well yet.

Every site implementing Wave on their servers in various ways would get us many things: single login to multiple sites and servers, which gives you the ability to instantly comment on a site you're on or play back a multitrack file on a site and record your own track on the fly with no setup. We would get the ability to change from an email type experience to photos to word processing to video, back to chat, all without having to call or text your friend to tell them to open Skype or Google Docs or whatever.

Google messed up by actually having a sort of completed-looking interface up. What they should have had first was a demo which not only showed cool things you could do, but demoed integration with Twitter, Skype and/or any other interesting tech out there, and an sdk for everyone to hook Wave up to their servers.

I'm aghast that Google is dropping the push for this tech without doing anything highly visible to get other companies and individuals implementing this on their end. Crazy wasted potential.

Edit: I'd like to add that all of this talk about using EtherPad "instead" of Wave is blindingly shortsighted. EtherPad could have incorporated Wave tech and been a limited client. Likewise, Twitter clients could be integrated with Wave, but just look like a normal Twitter client. Apple's Mail.app on either iPhones or Mac OS X could use Wave tech. This would have allowed a better interface for doing any of the particular things we're used to doing, while allowing the whole stream to go into and out of various types of media without breaking a sweat. The most this would require is having each client app have some sort of twitter-like feed to let you know when there is new content in the Wave with a type of content that you either need to go back to the main Wave site or open up a different client in order to view and/or edit that content.

Ian

I registered because of your post, I absolutely agree.

This should have brought us (people) closer together: not everyone I know uses IRC/skype/twitter/this-or-that-file-sharing-program/pick-your-social-network/etc. I cannot make all my friends use programs for the socialnetwork/protocol I most like to communicate through either. Which makes me have many IM's, socialnetork windows/email open and running at the same time, while by potential, I could have just had wave running, and running any of the other programs on a need to basis only.

Not only that, most of the moot points on wave written above me are correct, I really had hoped it would revolutionize things, like IM did in the beginning.

And last but not least, maybe it would have helped if google would finally release the wave server code so there could be public servers (like email works).

Man, I freaking *loved* Win 3.11's MDI! I was so pissed off when they switched to the current Frankenstein's Monster of an interface of today's MS Word. It was just like tabbed browsing! (I always kept the documents maximized, never minimized or windowed.)

I never drank the kool-aid that was google wave. I never saw a clear, buzzword-free explanation of what it was trying to replace, and why. Wave touted itself as the successor to email, among other things, because email is somehow broken? No one ever told me what part of email doesn't work. I spend half of every working day reading and writing dozens of emails. Email works plenty well enough for everyone I work with. What's the problem you're trying to solve?

Here are some of the specific problems with email that I thought wave was trying to solve;

-Conversation grouping is not an integral part of the spec. Clients try to intelligently guess at which messages should be grouped together but it will always be just a guess.

-Existing messes in a thread are too static. If I forget an attachment or mis-type a phone number I can't reach into everyones inbox and correct that error. The best I can do is send a second email and hope the recipients don't act on the first email before they get around to reading the second email.

-Adding people to a conversation is a broken process. I can either forward the email thus taking away their ability to continue the conversation using 'reply to all' or I can send out a useless 'adding Johnny to conversation' email.

Why didn't people use it? Because Google shot themselves in the foot from the get-go. They had an extremely limited Beta, which meant that right off the bat, if you managed to get an invite, you only knew a couple of people who had access to it, and you know there won't be 100% adoption. Each person got a few invites, but Google was slow in sending them out. The only finally got around to opening it up in MAY, and now they are canning it?

A lot of educators were actually jumping on board and getting into the idea, and were set to use it this fall, which would have increased usership substantially, though Google pulling the plug will likely cause many to shy away, even if they won't end the actual application.

I've found it frustrating because I've been a daily user, and while I agree with some of the criticisms of it, I've found it invaluable for staying in touch with friends across the country.

I found Wave to be extremely confusing to use. The biggest problem is that Wave was trying to be everything for everybody. Chat client, IM client, email client, collaboration client, make bots and you can make Wave do whatever you want. For an example of what Google was trying to do, take a look at this thing made for a programming contest to make the worst 4 function calculator.

Personally I decided that Google Wave wasn't worth changing browsers for. In the beginning they made Wave impossible to use, for us using Opera, by continuously making a notification that made all other interaction possibilities inactive. Even to this day I get asked to change browsers, when I log in to Wave, and that's even though Opera have provided all that would be needed to make Opera the best browser for the service(it has the fastest JavaScript engine after all).

I'm very disappointed with Wave's crash (heh). I just tried it out earlier this week and was very impressed. My girlfriend contributes to a design group and they meet weekly on IRC (which suck, IMHO). I've sat in on a few sessions and was struck by how terrible IRC was for brainstorming/conversations/file exchange/collaborative work. I looked into Wave and found that it had every feature that was needed. It had a number of plugins(including collaborative drawing), and with the threads, allowed more natural, non-linear conversations (at least, in theory). I haven't used it extensively so Jon's points may very well still be valid (as to picking out new messages in a thread), but as for the rest, I've been unable to find anything that offers all the features that Wave has. Apparently, some Gnomers have made use of Wave for extended sessions, but that is third-hand. If true, that would confirm what I thought Wave was ideal for: long distance collaboration that includes rich media, and flexible messaging. Great for work, not so much for people looking to replace Twitter/Facebook/etc.As for the interface... not Google's finest hour. I really don't understand why they choose to give each plugin its own window rather than making use of tabs, if another window was needed...

Here are some of the specific problems with email that I thought wave was trying to solve;

-Conversation grouping is not an integral part of the spec. Clients try to intelligently guess at which messages should be grouped together but it will always be just a guess.

-Existing messes in a thread are too static. If I forget an attachment or mis-type a phone number I can't reach into everyones inbox and correct that error. The best I can do is send a second email and hope the recipients don't act on the first email before they get around to reading the second email.

-Adding people to a conversation is a broken process. I can either forward the email thus taking away their ability to continue the conversation using 'reply to all' or I can send out a useless 'adding Johnny to conversation' email.

Yeah, that sounds about right to me. However, as various other commenters have pointed out, they completely shot themselves in the foot through network effects: unlike Gmail (which had a similar invite-only period), Wave only let you talk to other people with Wave accounts. Gmail, on the other hand, had plenty of ways to integrate with other email tools - you could forward other accounts to your gmail address, you could use a separate client via standard protocols, etc, etc.

If Google had prioritised development of a standard email plugin (allowing Wave to function as a message archiving server), an XMPP plugin (ditto for IM), a Google docs plugin (use Wave for discussion of a collaboratively edited document) and maybe Google Talk (easily start a voice conversation with Wave participants) and positioned Wave clearly as a tool for integrating other collaboration tools, *then* they may have got somewhere.

But by trying to *replace* all those tools (well, except Talk) instead of augmenting and integrating them Wave became "jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none" and suffered a corresponding fate (since, for any given task, it was worse than the alternative people were already using).

The Indy crew started using Wave to organize Arsmeets and events. We just found it easier to get everyone on than using the personal message system on Ars right now.It seemed more like the old forum's PM system where you could invite multiple people to a thread-like conversation.

Plus: I have tried to think of a reason (even a bad reason or a stupid reason) to be able to watch someone typing a message in real-time. There isn't one. The standard "Soandso is typing a message..." is fine, useful, conveys all the information I would need in real-time. I have no need to see someone fixing typos and rethinking words and phrases as they go. Why they would insist in keeping that "feature" turned on globally, I cannot imagine.

Actually, getting your answer before you finish formulating your question is kinda neat. Happened to me several times, and avoids the effort of reformulating your question. It's closer to person-to-person talk than IM in the traditional sense.

wow - I can really appreciate this thread - I can see the voices of those of us who feel wave is a great tool (kudos to those of you sharing what *does* work!) are drowned out by those who are quite critical about what didn't work!

That said, I think we're *all* doing a great job documenting wave's shortcomings and being a HUGE contribution to the community and not putting all our efforts to waste.

The debate around the purpose of "live typing" strikes my curiosity. Having a choice would bridge the gap between email and wave indeed. I just feel some of the most fascinating interactions I've had in wave was due to its ability to mimic life - that we all play off each other - sometimes interrupt each other while talking - why should online communication be any different? to put a random analogy out there - are people uncomfortable talking to each other on a first date? You get over it or crash and burn! your choice

Google Wave is a bit of a dance - things got clumsy and it's time to take a break and look back at what happened and make sense of the scenarios we invented. If "official" development is halted - so be it - sounds like an opportunity to clear the air, choose a new direction and move forward to me!

"For any application, you have to tell me in plain terms what I'm going to use it for, what problems it's going to solve, and how it's better than its competitors. If you can't do that—and I don't think Google ever did—it's more than likely going to end up in the bin."

Exactly. Google plops out a thing, hypes it with the usual web 2.0 buzzwords and somehow expects me to make the effort to figure out what it can do for me. Yeah, thanks but no thanks.

If Google had integrated it with gmail web interface straight from the beginning (like, composing new email would have a extra button, 'send as wave') and because of that had a gmailish-ly interface, it would have take off.

Can we just skip the “I don’t know what Wave is” comments? I’ve never used a long board but I don’t use that as justification for banning surfing.

I’m aggrieved that Google are shutting down Wave. I have found it genuinely useful. The UI could have used some tweaking but hell, it was only early days.

There is a worrying precedent here though: popularity measuring value. Google is an advertising firm – if they don’t get a large audience, or more critically a valuable demographic (and geeks evidently don’t count) then that user base has no value to them.

This is a crucial point for future Google products and platforms: If they don’t look populist, *we* won’t be able to rely on them sticking around.

Google are well within their rights to cease further development, but withdrawing Wave just makes Docs, GMail, Maps etc far less permanent. A very worrying precedent indeed.

Am I the only one concerned that handing over all my everything to Google is a bad idea? The more things they add, and the more they trick you into recording data on every service by logging into any of them, the less likely I am to use anything Google. (Except by necessity, which ironically provides them with a very clean signal. Hmm....)

But also, I got an invite, joined, and it was like, "OK, what now? I can talk to Jason, but... I talk to him anyway." I think that was my only session on '\/\/`ave.

There is a worrying precedent here though: popularity measuring value. Google is an advertising firm – if they don’t get a large audience, or more critically a valuable demographic (and geeks evidently don’t count) then that user base has no value to them.

Popularity does measure value in a capitalist society. That's the "demand" part of the supply and demand market equilibrium. If no one uses something, and it costs money to produce, why continue producing it?

The bit about "geeks evidently don't count" doesn't make sense because even "geeks" didn't use it. Did you miss the entire front page article which outlined why the Ars staff didn't use it? The majority of my friends are first-adopter types. None of them used it either because it didn't have a unique value proposition. It didn't solve any of their problems, and didn't create a solution to a problem they didn't realize they had. Consequently they didn't use it.

First adopters are crucial to any new product success. By Google's standards, the level of adoption was quite low even among the demographic that normally makes up the first adopter wave. So they shut it down.

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This is a crucial point for future Google products and platforms: If they don’t look populist, *we* won’t be able to rely on them sticking around.

Uh, Google cancels products all the time. Here is a comprehensive list. Those products aren't especially noteworthy because the geek community didn't have a collective orgasm about them when they were released to the public and/or acquired. (With the exception, maybe, of Dodgeball.) They lived quiet lives and died quiet deaths. Google kills products all the time, just like any other company you buy products from.

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Google are well within their rights to cease further development, but withdrawing Wave just makes Docs, GMail, Maps etc far less permanent. A very worrying precedent indeed.

Not even a little, because Google docs is growing in popularity, is part of the Google Apps for Your Domain package (a paid service in some instances), and is meaningful competition to Google's biggest enemy: Microsoft. Wave was none of these things.

I don't think most people got past wave.google.com for what Wave actually was. I read tech sites writing reviews about Wave (not Ars, fortunately) without actually mentioning the protocol whatsoever. And I think that was the problem, Wave the website was never more than a demo that somehow found itself relegated to being Wave in its entirety, despite being of fairly horrible design and a failure in implementation.

I'm hoping this has been killed in lieu of something better, so they get a second chance at execution.

Google's problem is what may have previously been its strength: it's a company filled with computer scientists, in desperate need of engineers. In other words, they have lots of idea people and algorithm people, but not nearly enough people that know how to build a good product.

Really?* Gmail* Docs* Reader* Calendar* Maps* Earth* Android

and I could probably go on.

Google has had a tremendous impact on web computing with innovation after innovation of *working* products.

It gave my friends and me the opportunity to chat with inline reply, not in real-time. I.e., I could log on three hours later than everyone else and make comments on what everyone else had said and still be part of a conversation. this was very valuable to us, and I suspect would be valuable to other people as well. Was the interface perfect? No, sure, it wasn't but as someone else said, early days, I'm sure Google could have improved it.

I'm honestly interested if you or anyone knows of other applications which allow for this sort of collaboration - not just IRC, this doesn't solve the problem of us not being online at the same time, or inline responses.

"The live typing was a core part of the Wave protocol, and the developers considered it a critical Wave feature that everyone should just either get over or learn to love."

When I first saw that live typing was int there, I rejected the one invite for Wave I had received. I want to type out what I am thinking quickly and then go back and review it to make sure it is fit to post.

This seems to be a common theme in several of Google's projects. The one in particular that annoys me is that Google insists that everyone should learn to like the conversation mode of how Gmail presents emails. There are a lot of people (including me) that would prefer the traditional style of displaying mail and Google even makes it an option to request in their page for suggestions, but for at least four years they have just plain disregarded it because it is not how they want it.

I've learned to deal with the way mail is presented, but I still get frustrated at times when a new message sometimes gets placed in an old and unrelated conversation just because it has the same subject. I don't see it doing it nearly as often, but it still happens.

I'm at a point of inertia/apathy as I don't want to deal with switching up providers again. I miss fastmail.fm but a 10MB inbox was getting rather difficult to deal with the last few months I had those accounts.

Google was not necessarily going to have access to your data. The purpose (at least as stated in their initial demo) was to have wave running on your server. You control your data. I would completely agree with the person above that wave.google.com is a demo site of some things you can do with Wave NOT the complete picture of what Wave was supposed to be.

The way I saw it, google was making a way for you to have control. Same as running your own Jabber chat server while still being able to connect to chat.google.com accounts.

Ian

blueshifter wrote:

Am I the only one concerned that handing over all my everything to Google is a bad idea? The more things they add, and the more they trick you into recording data on every service by logging into any of them, the less likely I am to use anything Google. (Except by necessity, which ironically provides them with a very clean signal. Hmm....)

But also, I got an invite, joined, and it was like, "OK, what now? I can talk to Jason, but... I talk to him anyway." I think that was my only session on '\/\/`ave.

Ironically, I was on the other end as somebdy being roped into trying Wave. Several of us use Google docs for our writing since it's a great collaborative editing tool. One of us caught the wave bug and tried to draw the others into it, citing it does everything.

Apparently he had much more patience than I did. I fired up Wave to view his work and was greeted by the most cluttered, unimaginative interface possible. Looking back on it, the experience reminded me of loading up an inefficient website that overly abuses html frames. Tracking the direction of his project wasn't impossible, but it was amazingly unintuitive for something google would produce. I maybe checked the project twice before my attention fell by the wayside versus picking through Wave's layout.

How it even saw the light of day in the condition its currently in remains beyond me; especially since this very same reaction appears to be so prevelant.

An email application, that heavily incorporates their search business. Good product - I use it daily.

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* Docs

A low rent office suite with nothing approaching the features of MS Office or OpenOffice, whose main attraction is online collaboration.

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* Reader

Your third choice in this list was a document reader? Really?

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* Calendar

...and your fourth a calendar application?

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* Maps

Good product that has seen its competitors out-innovate it for a few years now.

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* Earth

Not developed by google - they bought it from Keyhole.

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* Android

Custom linux. Hardly ground breaking.

I'll also throw in one you didnt include - Picasa. This wasn't developed by Google either, but by Idealab.

Nkp wrote:

Google has had a tremendous impact on web computing with innovation after innovation of *working* products.

Their main innovations have been in complex algorithmic solutions to issues of scale, relevance, etc. Their innovations have not been in solidly built products - the ones they do have they bought from other companies.

The initial content-less reporting on it coupled to the invite-only system left me feeling confused and left out. By the time I was not any longer left out I still could not figure out what it was for. People I knew refused to use it because I couldn't really tell them what it was.

Recently, I asked a new hire if he would like to use it as a collaboration tool. There was an awkward silence and we are now using Google Docs...

I noticed a pattern in the narratives of Wave testers:1) I finally got a Google Wave invitation!2) The interface to Google Wave is awful.3) No one else is using Google Wave.4) I quit.

This really didn't encourage me to look into it further.

I'm kind of tired of hearing about efforts to unify communication and collaboration tools. It always seems to involve creating yet another communication tool, thus making the problem worse.

For integrating different means of electronic communications, what you need is a computer with Internet access and a graphical windowing system. The windowing system needs to allow you to switch between applications and copy information from one application to another. That is, you need to make use of the tools you already have. There's a social problem: getting groups to agree on which tools to use, for which purposes. An all-in-one communication tool that secures hegemony would merely shorten the process of getting the group to agree.

It's way too easy to say for everyone, and even Ars Technica what it didn't work AFTER Google has announced that is pulling the plug off Google Wave.

I think Google got a lot of this feedback within the first few months of Wave; I know I sent some of it to them and I am pretty sure I remember a lot of this same commentary here @ Ars in that timeframe.

They had something pretty nifty there. The idea did not suck. The execution is what sucked.

They had something pretty nifty there. The idea did not suck. The execution is what sucked.

Really? You mean the idea of almost random access to change conversations in situ, altering their context in wild and non-linear ways, and promoting and almost chaotic collaboration model; all coupled with live typing, and a philosophy of maintaining total-recall of every single minute alteration, regardless of its value and relevance; that idea did not suck?

I cannot imagine any sane person adopting such a model for a real productive process.

As others have said, it had some very narrow applications, for instance, role-playing and project management, but these were arguably facilitated by limiting the scope and application of its inherent features--not because of the them.

They had something pretty nifty there. The idea did not suck. The execution is what sucked.

Really? You mean the idea of almost random access to change conversations in situ, altering their context in wild and non-linear ways, and promoting and almost chaotic collaboration model; all coupled with live typing, and a philosophy of maintaining total-recall of every single minute alteration, regardless of its value and relevance; that idea did not suck?

I cannot imagine any sane person adopting such a model for a real productive process.

As others have said, it had some very narrow applications, for instance, role-playing and project management, but these were arguably facilitated by limiting the scope and application of its inherent features--not because of the them.

In other words, it attempted to solve the *wrong* problem.

-dZ.

Edit: Quoted text for relevance.

Well, this guy certainly used it, and I've thought about using it for similar things. I just wish the interface sucked less.

They had something pretty nifty there. The idea did not suck. The execution is what sucked.

Really? You mean the idea of almost random access to change conversations in situ, altering their context in wild and non-linear ways, and promoting and almost chaotic collaboration model; all coupled with live typing, and a philosophy of maintaining total-recall of every single minute alteration, regardless of its value and relevance; that idea did not suck?

I cannot imagine any sane person adopting such a model for a real productive process.

I would counter with how I found it useful in certain collaborative projects, but since I can't prove my sanity to you, I guess it wouldn't matter. So I will only note that it's possible to disagree with a little more civility.

I watched the first video presentation but I never got the invitation. I waited patiently and when the Wave opened for everybody I started to use it for collaborative projects with several participants. Sometimes e-mail list becomes very tedious and hard to scroll back and review how the discussion goes. There was a problem looking for the solution.

Wave was not perfect and there was some initial reluctance but it is understandable as other participants were not so geeky. It wasn't used as replacement for e-mail but rather an addition. We discussed all specs and then others reported back the results that I could comment on and so on. Other participants are added per necessity and no worries that something essential said in the first e-mail will be missed. I guess that we did it really well in these two months and I am still thinking how to break the news that Wave has to be discontinued. I tried alternatives but they are not viable. Nor is Google docs.

Some other thoughts:

- If so many early invitees say that they had no clue what to do with the Wave, apparently Google did not invite the right people.

- Maybe Google didn't want to invite the “right” people. They wanted the next Facebook used by masses not the collaborative tool for a specific business users.

- The way how Google killed the Wave is more troubling than the fact that they killed it. Too much emphasis on “either quick success or failure”. Where is the dedication?

- It makes me feel that Google themselves didn't know what they really wanted. To conquer facebook and twitter they only needed to make a better one which doesn't require the level of sophistication that the Wave had.

- If they made a great tool in the process, why did they throw it away so quickly? Unintended side effects of innovations often become great technologies.

For me, it felt like Teleconferencing software, where users could participate at once to write the same document. A Whiteboard app, more or less. While this has obvious application in business use, for casual or informal communication it's not very attractive. My friends and I came to the same conclusion: we don't work together in real life, why are we using this? Reminded me too much of Oracle's Conference Server or something that Citrix would make.

Besides, the "Whiteboard" is available in Google Docs anyway. Two people sharing a doc can edit it live now. For business use, Wave isn't necessary anymore.